Becoming Unfamiliar
by Largely Inconsequential
Summary: Glenn wakes up in an unfamiliar place, one that appears to be a hospital room. With a working vital sign monitor beeping out his racing pulse, he has what feels like seconds to determine where he is, and just how long he has until Walkers eat him, attracted by the noise. More importantly, why is he there, and why is he so damn tired? [AU, Glenn-Centric, Multi-Chaptered]
1. The Awakening

It has been a long time since I've written anything for you, my dear followers. I'm sorry about that. I've been going through a lot, and doing a lot of _growing_ up. Right now I'm trying to make my way into the field of Social Work. I've learned a lot in the time I've been away, and here's to hoping I do well with this. You may have noticed that I deleted two of my abandoned stories... they aren't coming back. In the meantime however, I'm going to try to dedicate myself more fully to this one, and once I complete it, I may do more.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy this Glenn-centric AU fanfiction. I propose, as well, a toast.

_To the magic of words, for while they often fall short of their intentions, they are a force unto themselves._

* * *

I woke with a gasp, a frightful noise that burst from my throat as though it was one of those... _Walkers_... trying to bluntly beat its way out of me. My heart was pounding, and a shrill monotone beeping (which had been somewhat quiet in the first instant of wakefulness) went haywire, loud and rapid and regular. Panic flooded me... they'd hear it. I was not safe with this damn noise going on!

I searched the white room for something to use. There was _nothing_ remotely resembling a weapon, and I cursed under my breath and ripped an IV... wait, an _IV_?... out of my arm. I hissed a little at the sensation before getting up, tearing an oxygen thing out of my nose, cursing again as the loud beeping turned into a long monotonic wail. _It thinks I flatlined,_ I realized, relying on an ancient memory of long-forgotten everyday items, things taken for granted and shunted aside. This was not safe. It seemed like a hospital, but how did I get here? There was no way civilization had rebuilt itself here. The Walkers had killed too many people, and suicide and murder had claimed too many more. Was this a trick, played by Rick? Did they come here to get help for Lori, so that she could bear her baby, and maybe hook me up to something still working? But why would they hook me up to such a noisy machine? I remembered suddenly that they all died, and my stress and panic levels reached whole new levels. For a moment I honestly considered whether my heart would burst on the spot.

I crouched and headed towards the door, despite feeling suddenly, inexplicably exhausted. It was as if in a few moments I had run a marathon, and my body, just seconds ago awake and alert and scared, had begun to shut down despite my state of panic, and the adrenaline flooding me. I felt myself collapse and my eyes shut despite my own fervent struggles to stay awake, damn it. A female voice shouted and I felt gentle, firm hands support my head and back, but they felt more like gnarled claws digging into my flesh. I let out a delirious whimper as my senses dimmed, and I floated away on the breeze. I had survived so much, only to die at the end because I needed a cat nap. It would have broken me if I had been conscious enough to think it.

* * *

"Mr. Hunter?" A soft, feminine voice echoed softly in the room as my eyes fluttered open. "Mr. Gregory Hunter?"

I was so confused, I couldn't think to respond, so she repeated it again. I realized that her voice was the same one I'd heard before, when I had collapsed. I blinked a few times, and her face slowly swam into focus.

When I saw her face, I think I almost shit bricks. I am sure I must have freaked her out with my sudden attempt to shy away according to her expression, but I fainted again before I could be sure.

I woke again what felt a short while later. She was still there, bustling around the room, fixing a few cards on the nightside table. I must have knocked them over when I tried to get up.

"Maggie?" I breathed. There was a tight, headachy feeling around my temples, like suppressed tears. I knew I was close to crying, but I didn't dare do it. If this was really Maggie, I couldn't bear to cry in front of her.

"Who?" She asked, brow furrowed. And then I remembered that Maggie was _dead._ She and Beth had both committed suicide at the Farm, while Shane and Rick had been trying to decide what to do with Randall.

"How... are you alive? You died. You... you died, you killed yourself. Beth had convinced you to, and we found you both on the bed, blood everywhere, and..."

I didn't get a chance to finish. She was too shocked by what I was saying, and ran out the door, calling for a Doctor Seamus O'Neal.

* * *

When the doctor, Seamus, came in with the reluctant Maggie beside him, I had to do a double-take. It was Hershel. What the hell was Hershel doing here? My mind buzzed with questions. This was the second dead I had seen come back to life. He had died, a bullet through his brain at my doing, after the Walkers had broken into the farm and bitten him. I had killed him at his behest, and now, he was right in front of me, not an injury or trace of the bullet wound to be seen.

"I... don't understand," I whispered, eyes wider than ever before.

"Mr. Gregory Hunter," the doctor said soothingly, "I understand there has been some confusion."

"My name is _Glenn_, Glenn _Rhee_, and you're both dead. I killed you, Hershel, well that was after you had been bitten, but you're dead, and so's your daughter there- Maggie- she killed herself, with Beth, you know, her sister, your other daughter?"

Hershel (or Seamus, at this point I was too confused to separate the names) and Maggie shared a very concerned, very dumbfounded look.

"Mr. Hunter, I think we need to have a talk. Would you mind telling me your story?"

"My name is _Glenn,_ Hershel. _Glenn Rhee._ Don't you remember?"

Hershel sighed and took a seat next to my chair, getting out a tape recorder.

"I'm sorry. _Glenn, _then, if that's what you prefer to be called. Do you mind if I record your story for my records? It will be a lot harder to figure out what's going on if I don't."

I nodded slowly, and waited until he'd turned the microphone on, stated the date and patient name ("Gregory Hunter- err, Glenn Rhee,") and set the thing on my nightstand, and then parted my lips to tell him the horrible, horrible tale of how I'd come to be the last one in Rick's Group to survive.


	2. The Shock

It had been a very, very long time since I'd recounted in detail the deaths of my dearest friends.

The first to go had been Amy, of course, back at the camp outside of Atlanta. I had the least trouble describing her death, and the circumstances around it. I was about twenty minutes into my tale, having already gone over what happened to my family during the initial outbreak, and why I set off on my own, and how I got to Atlanta with the Dixon brothers because I was lucky enough to be spending the night in an abandoned liquor store and traded all the booze I'd squirrelled away for the ability to stay with them. They also admitted, after a few days, that I was a 'a damn typical asian genius' when it came to strategizing and getting around. Not so much with hunting, though, to their dismay.

From Amy's death, I described the journey to the highway where T-Dog died, the loss of Sophia, and the way Carl had been shot by Otis; how Shane had come back empty handed, without Otis, and Carl had eventually died. How Lori was revealed to be pregnant, how Maggie and Beth had killed themselves in the Farmhouse. How Andrea shot Daryl and then, in her haste to get down to him, fell off the RV near the ladder, but got her leg tangled in it, and broke said appendage. It was an open fracture, the bone had come out through the skin, severing the major artery in her leg as it did. In the process she'd also slammed her head against the side of the RV hard enough to put her into a coma Hershel wasn't sure she'd come out of- it had been a close call and he wasn't sure he was even going to be capable to stabilize her that much.

Shane and Dale had gotten into a fight and, one way or another, Dale had been shot and killed. Shane claimed it was an accident, but nobody was stupid enough to trust him with a gun after that. Shortly after Dale's death, walkers swarmed the more or less unprotected farm at night, when the group had forgotten to assign someone to watch. The farmhouse was overrun, it was impossible that Andrea would have survived (at least she wasn't aware of it I hope), and Hershel begged me to be put down after he'd been bitten. I had to do it, because everyone else was at the RV, except for Rick and Shane who were out with Randall... and I would never burden a woman with having to take a living person's life unless it was necessary.

Rick came back alone as the dead had killed both Shane and Randall. Unlike with Shane, everyone knew Rick well enough to understand he had no choice in whether to bring them back or not. If it was possible, he would have saved them. Nobody believed otherwise. It took half an hour after his return for everyone to finish packing up and start moving on.

With a bit of luck and desperation, we found a prison. Things were going well at first, until one of the inmates killed Carol, and the nearly-ready-to-give-birth Lori was no match for him. She managed to make it a double death, for he never left the cell she'd been sleeping in, but it was no consolation to us. The three other inmates were apologetic about the whole thing, but they still turned us out shortly afterward. Rick was in no shape to lead, too wracked by grief; he had been able to focus on Lori and the baby enough after Carl died to keep going, but now he had nothing. I ended up taking his position, and by the looks of it, Merle and Daryl didn't mind too much, since I ended up treating it like a democracy anyway, only veto-ing things if it went against what Merle called 'obscure asian strategist rules'. We ended up asking the Inmates to allow Rick to stay with them; he would only die out there, and at the least if he recovered with them, he would be a handy gunman if they needed it, and he was smart about security- and he would accept that they were his new group and wouldn't go against them. They agreed, and we never saw them or Rick again.

A little while after we'd left the prison, Merle disappeared while hunting, and we couldn't find him. We found his arrows and the buck he'd taken down, though, and Daryl was broken for the two days that we'd spent there before moving on. Eventually we found a small gas depot, boarded it up, and made it somewhat liveable. We built a bit of a house on top of it, on its roof; it wasn't up to before-outbreak codes, but that didn't matter too much to us. We made a farm up there, too, as hard as it was. Daryl seemed to be recovering from the loss of his brother, but he still wasn't doing too well when the Walkers figured out how to get up to us. In our grief we'd neglected to make sure we moved the corpses away from the wall of the depot; they managed to climb over their fallen brethren and were assailing our pitifully built house. Daryl was about to blow his own brains out to avoid being bitten and to give me an unwanted chance to escape. I had shouted 'NO' at the top of my lungs, and then... then I had woken up in a strange room that reminded me of pre-outbreak hospitals.

* * *

I licked my dry lips as I finally met Hershel's gaze, only to see shock, concern, and disbelief written all over his face. I felt tired again, which was a disappointment considering I should have been ready to get up and move again.

"Why am I so tired?" I asked, and Hershel shook his head.

"Well, it's not a big deal," Maggie interjected. "It's expected for someone who has... gone through your ordeal. Dr. Seamus... let's go get Dr. Blake. He can explain what happened better than we can, Mr. Hunter."

I frowned at Maggie after she called me 'Hunter' again, and watched her warily as she trotted out of the room in her nurse's outfit I'd never seen her wear before, followed by Hershel in a white lab coat that I didn't remember him owning, either. I let my eyes drift shut after they left, and I didn't wake up again until the next day (or so I later learned).

"Hello, Mr. Hunter," I heard a familiar voice say. I had been staring at the ceiling for about a minute, trying to place everything, and when I saw Daryl trotting into the room, my breath hitched in my throat and I forced myself out of bed again to latch onto him, sobbing. "I th-thought you were d-dead! Don't ever fucking scare me like that again, Daryl! You hear me? I don't ever want you to do that! What was going through your damn head, I-"

To my utter surprise and dismay, Daryl took me by the shoulders, forced me to sit down, and took a casual seat near my bed.

"I'm afraid that you haven't been told everything, Mr. Hunter- may I call you Gregory?"

"My name is Glenn, goddamn, Daryl, why is everyone acting like none of what we all went through happened?"

"Because it didn't, Gregory. I hate to break it to you so bluntly, but you've been in a coma for the last two years. It is the year 2013, you have no next of kin that we could find, and you're in Ontario, Canada. Scarborough General Hospital, to be specific."

I suppose my disbelief and irritation must have been written all over my face, because Daryl shook his head at me.

"My name," he continued, "Is Casey Blake. I am an only child, and I grew up in this neighbourhood. I came in to check up on you from the beginning, because an individual slipping into a coma at work for no reason is certainly a phenomenon, and I hoped to discover the reason, as I am a licensed psychologist. Aside from visiting you in your coma, I have never before met you. I wish it was under better circumstances, but be that as it may, it is nice to finally do so."

I think the fact that this Casey, so much like Daryl he may look, spoke in such a different manner (for he was not quite as taciturn, and definitely seemed more educated) was what made me believe that he, at least, was not really the Daryl I knew. Still, I refused to acknowledge his insistance that the outbreak had never happened- that was impossible. I also could not accept one without the other, for Daryl and Casey were the same, one voice, and one face, their features were too similar to be anything but one person. This, I decided, was a mystery. It must be that Daryl was simply brainwashed, hypnotized, or something. I decided that I had to get out of here- and take them with me- before whoever was running this place realized that it was just like the CDC centre, ready to explode at a moment's notice, and sealed us all in with them. Or worse, brainwashed me as well.

Daryl looked at me with an odd expression, and I supposed that he had deduced at least some of what my train of thought had been. I gave him a sheepish look. "Listen, Daryl, I don't expect you to to lie to me, and so I guess you aren't lying, unless perhaps you have a very good reason for it. Still, you don't have that much skill in lying; you don't do it very often. Here's my proposition to you: I will try to believe what you're telling me, and you will try to believe what I am telling you. Perhaps we can find out more of what's going on that way- you, as a Psychologist, will understand more about me and what may have caused my... coma... or whatever, and I'll eventually figure out why you're telling me I was in one."

Daryl seemed a little surprised at my suggestion, and smiled, wherein I cut him off before he could speak again. "Wait, there's one condition," I told him. "You have to answer to Daryl, and call me Glenn."

He sighed. "I'd be breaching policies if I did that," He said, frowning. "But... here, a compromise. We'll call each other Daryl and Glenn in private, and Casey and Gregory in public."

I agreed to it hesitatingly... going by Gregory for his sake couldn't be that bad, and at least it would only be in public.

"So," Daryl said, "I heard your story already, but there were a few points I'd like you to elaborate on, if you wouldn't mind. After that, we can get lunch, if you're hungry."

* * *

When I finished doing enough talking to satisfy him, which was very close to being a little too much for my taste, some food was brought in. On some level I was excited to see real food rather than the meat we'd been eating and cooking ourselves, not to mention the slop before that, but on another I was disappointed at having to eat hospital food again. On another level entirely it was nice, feeling the mundanity of being annoyed with the kind of food hospitals serve their patients.

"Hey, Glenn," Daryl said after the nurse bringing food had left, "What kind of evidence do you think you would need in order to believe that the outbreak never occurred?"

I thought it over for a while. "For one, I'd need to fly around in a helicopter around most of the US and Canada, to make sure that this isn't just a single zone that survivors somehow reclaimed and barricaded. For two, I'd have to see proof that there are still around a couple million people still alive."

Daryl grinned at me, almost as though I had said something silly. "Well," he said, "I may not be able to prove without a doubt in the next few minutes that there are still seven or so billion of us kicking around, but I've got some good proof that nothing happened here. Look out the window."

I hesitated for a few minutes before, with his assistance, I hobbled (for some reason I was so very weak) into the wheelchair next to my bed and let him wheel me to the window. When I glanced outside, I was shocked. There were busses so full of people that an accident could kill at least thirty of them passing by every five to ten minutes. Hundreds of cars passed in the same time frame, and ten to twenty pedestrians crossed my line of sight every ten minutes. It was either, I reflected, a very complex hallucination, a very detailed hologram or other illusion, or it was real, and there were thousands of people in this part of the city alone.

I think that's about the point at which I fainted.


End file.
